


an unfinished fic for fern

by buckybunnyteeth



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Gen, trans girl armando ramon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 20:21:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12733644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckybunnyteeth/pseuds/buckybunnyteeth
Summary: Armando, Amanda, Mand. Cisco Ramon took one look a monster, and gave it a new name with a smile.or; an unfinished fic for fern





	an unfinished fic for fern

Amanda doesn’t really know how she got here. This is not a new feeling. Its been almost a year and half since her brother saved her, bought her in from the cold, and little has made sense since. She was blood soaked and knife sharp, a jagged broken off thing that didn't remember how to be a person. Her brother, so much older and softer now, took one look at the monster, smiled and gave it a new name.

Amanda. She still doesn’t know how to say it without choking. She was fine with Armando, admired that it came from their great grandfather and his father and so forth. But Amanda … Amanda has the potential to have no sharp edges. Amanda may one day be able to unlearn the taste of blood and the smell of war. Amanda is endless possibilities and day by day she gets closer and closer to becoming her. Amanda is beginning to feel things again now. Maybe it’s a weakness but it makes her brother smile.

Her brother, who has possibly the weirdest friends in the world.

Sometime since she was taken Cisco had obviously achieved all his goals; gone to college, became the scientist of his dreams, and then somehow gotten involved with a group of superheroes. Spandex wearing cape toting superheroes straight out of a Saturday morning cartoons. And Cisco designs their costumes. Amanda doesn’t know what to feel about that either.

She met Barry right away, before she realised that Cisco wasn't a dream and before she got her new name. He looked so funny dashing around in red. She had toyed with him, drawing him close enough so she could hit him with a blast and cut him off from the speed force permanently. Speedsters were so easy to destroy on every world, they were always so cocky. But then Cisco had stepped out and her blast missed. For the first time in over ten years she missed her target.

After she was bought in from the cold Barry was just as funny. He seemed to be comprised of a strange pile of mismatched character traits, each of them easy to exploit, but he had genuinely wanted to help her. Cisco saved her and then Amanda witnessed the way her brother looked at Barry like he was the sun. She catalogued Barry in two categories in her mind; weakness and asset and decided she would help keep him alive even if it didn't offer any strategic power. As long as Barry kept her brother smiling like that.

Wally and Jessie, who both were obviously afraid of her were different creatures but ultimately similar to Barry. They were both cocky and cheerful but they zipped around without the same weight that she could see on Barry's shoulders. Now they have shouldered some of that weight, but they don't have any dark in their eyes yet. They are still afraid of her, though now they will at least try to talk to her. She never knows what to say. She wants to say their costumes make them look like easy targets which isn't something they should be advertising while its still the truth.

She sees the Green Arrow on the news and meets Oliver Queen once out of his costume. The HD screen makes the green look hyper bright though Cisco tells her they are more the cool tones of jungle leaves. When she meets the man in person she leaves before they can say too much to each other. She recognises something in his eyes that she doesn’t want to see. He doesn’t seek her out and she is grateful for that.

The rest of the costumed people she met two days ago when a hole ripped in space over the earth and something big and tentacled and evil proclaimed its dominance over this dimension and its dwellers. They poured into the city and Cisco convinced Amanda to come with Team Flash across the city to an old warehouse outfitted as a second command centre. It’s also home to a few large mechanical skeletons she recognised as her brothers work.

Amanda didn't know what to make of these people. She could tell that her brother is close to some of them- Jax and Stein- and he has a chummy relationship with most of team arrow, and an obvious hero worship of Supergirl and Sara. The others he seems to know less personally, and when he keeps a weary eye on the man stroking what looks like a flame throwing gun, Amanda makes sure that she is always positioned between him and Cisco.

She figures out how to kill each and every one of them within the first ten minutes. She's getting slow.

First, she would take out the powered people, use a vibe blast to take out the technology of the others and anyone left would be easily taken care of. It would be easy, over in a couple of minutes.

Across the room the guy Cisco called Rip catches her eye and looks at her like he knows exactly what she's thinking. She holds his gaze until he looks away first. She's not about to let a freaking Time Master see her blink. They're all bastards who never do any good for anyone but themselves.

Oliver and Barry take charge of the team and Amanda quickly loses interest. They're going to attack a command post on earth that is beaming a sonic wave up into space which is opening the rift for the monster. Their plan is overly simplified and easily disrupted but from the look on Cisco's face Amanda guesses they don't want to hear her criticisms. She slips away from the crowd and floats up to one of the inventions Cisco has left half-finished and hanging from the ceiling. Amanda thinks it may be a jet pack prototype but it’s so unfinished it’s hard to tell. She situates herself on the bar beside it, pulls out the portable toolkit she borrows from the lab and sets to work finishing what her brother started. She’s found solace in the repetitive motions of building things since she came back. Sometimes it makes her hands shake with the weight of what she could have been if she were never taken, if she was the first one in her family to go to college and she was allowed to be something other than what she is now. But today those thoughts don't worm their way in and instead her mind goes pleasantly blank as she works.

She attaches power couplings, detaches and reattaches panels and completely reworks the fuelling system, she's going to need a soldering iron and a blowtorch if this thing is ever going to actually get off the ground, maybe she can open and rift and duck out without anyone-

“Manda!”

Amanda breaks out of her meditative state at Barry’s shout. She looks down to see most of the team checking over their weapons and getting their costumes in order. Her brother is tinkering with his Vibe glasses in what she recognises as a nervous gesture. The usual stab in the pit of her stomach that comes whenever her brother goes out to fight rips through her stomach and she bites her tongue against it. Her brother is a hero and she must live with that. And his enemies will not have to live long the day he comes home with so much as a paper cut.

“We're moving out to the transmission base,” Barry continues, grinning up at her like they're going out for doughnuts, “Wanna tag along?”

Amanda stops tinkering with the jet pack instantly.

She hasn't been out on any 'missions' since she became Amanda. All of her interactions in helping team Flash were from the Lab over the coms or building something in her brother’s workshop. She hasn't used her powers against any of the bad guys they've faced, has only used them in training her brother and other non-combative roles.

Amanda thinks of the missions they sent The Hound on and her fist tightens around the screwdriver she is holding till she feels the plastic handle crack.

“No.”

“Oh,” Barry replies, forced levity filling his voice, “So um- that’s cool. You'll stay here and keep a watch on things then! If that’s alright with you of course.”

Amanda's eyes flick over to where the 'non-combatives' are grouped around the computer monitors. She doesn’t know the hacker from the Kryptonians earth, or the blond one from Star City, but they're standing with Iris. Iris who is kind to her without an edge to it, and who makes her brother smile just as bright as Barry dose.

“Yes.”

Barry nods and Iris smiles.

“Manda's got my back, Bear,” she says, nothing false about the cheer in her voice, “Nothing’s going to happen to us with her here.”

She turns her smile up to Amanda and something flips in her stomach. Amanda thinks Iris might be her friend. She really doesn’t know what to do with that information.

Cisco places the goggles over his eyes and looks up at her with a smile.

“No parties while we're gone, okay?”

Amanda rolls her eyes because she remembers that’s what she used to do before, and flips him off because that’s what Dante would do. It makes Cisco laugh and she catalogues that away for later.

They leave shortly after that, leaving Rip the Time Master and the man with the flame-thrower behind with the others. She recognises that the second man is probably too volatile for a mission like they are going on. But she can't place why they would leave a Time Master behind. Amanda would think someone like him would be suited to a mission like this.

Deciding she doesn’t like not knowing Amanda drops down from the rafters, the fuelling device of the jet pack in hand, and sits herself in the middle of the room between the men and Iris. Rip raises an eyebrow at her in question. She keeps a weary eye on them and goes back to work.

Iris sits down beside her after a while and makes conversation. She is used to Amanda's scarce use of words so she dose the majority of the talking, tells Amanda about the wedding planning and how she has had to reschedule a doctors appointment for her food poisoning twice because of the article she's been writing about a drug cartel operating in a local school. Amanda listens, humming in the right places and carefully remembering everything Iris tells her. She's missed out on so much she wants to learn everything she can, from the vapid celebrity gossip, to the recent developments in theoretical physics, to everything that makes Cisco and his friends smile. She wants to know everything, a compulsion she felt when she was young that has somehow woken itself up in the past months. Maybe the things she thought died in her were only wounded.

The hackers speak quickly and lowly into the com units, but Amanda hears no panic in their voice so she doesn’t pay them any mind and keeps the majority of her concentration on the two men across the room. One of them is lazily drinking a beer whilst the other, the time master paces back and forth while typing on a holographic device. He doesn’t look happy to have been left behind. Judging by the amount of empty beer bottles around the feet of the other man he’s quite content with the situation.

They are completely different men. The whole team of superheroes as far as Amanda can see are contrary to each other. Some of them use non-lethal weapons, others carry lethal weapons, and others are themselves lethal weapons. Some chose this when they had a million choices and others didn't have a choice at all except the choice to stay as what they are now. She doesn’t understand it, understands even less how they actually function together.

She can remember the legions of Mordeth and how uniform they were. All individuality was snuffed out, all free will extinguished. Few served with free uncontrolled minds. And they were some of the cruellest creatures Amanda had ever met.

She is suddenly glad for the strange team of misfits.

Iris is laughing at her for spilling motor oil on her overalls when the team comes back. Right away the room goes quiet and Amanda knows something is wrong. The team streams in grim faced and solemn but Amanda isn't looking at them. Her eyes flick between them in search of her brother. When she finally spots him she stands up abruptly, leaving the fuel unit to clatter against the floor deafeningly.

Cisco is crying.

Barry passes and lays a steadying hand on her shoulder but she can't feel it. She's suddenly frozen. Suddenly decreased to a deafening heartbeat and a copper stained mouth. She can't move and her brother is crying.

“Cisco!” Iris exclaims, “What happened?”

Cisco dodges her concerned hands and moves through the crowd to sit down on top of a group of crates, a sheet of hair shielding his face from prying eyes. He looks so small.

Amanda thinks she is going to be sick.

Warring emotions tear through her. She wants to storm out of there, to grab her scythe and rip apart whatever hurt her brother. She wants to bath the earth in their blood and send a message to every living thing in the multi-verse that a hand raised against her brother is a death sentence.

But she also wants to run away, far far away from the horror struck look on his face. She wants to curl up somewhere safe and regroup because it feels like something in her chest is ripping and she doesn’t remember how to deal with feeling things yet. Selfishly she wants to close her eyes and erase the idea that her brother could ever be hurt.

Oliver stops at Iris's side and sighs.

“We destroyed the base but we found out there are seventeen more all over the earth and another in space. Cisco...” he takes off his mask to rub his eyes.

“Cisco got surprised by one of the fanatics,” Sara continues for him, steel in her eyes and voice, “He blasted them and they went down.”

“Dead?” Iris asks in a barely there whisper.

“No. Worse.” Sara looks down at her feet with a grimace, “It was horrible.”

Iris covers her mouth with her hand and looks over at Cisco. The rest of the team is milling around, speaking quietly and casting glances over at him. She knows without knowing that their deciding who will go and talk to him.

Suddenly, Amanda remembers very clearly what the people The Hound toyed with looked like. How they screamed. It was worse than death to have your entire nervous system shattered, for all of your bones to be broken and yet still horribly alive. Horrible to live through, and horrible to see. And her brother just saw it for the first time.

The thought unfreezes her and before anyone else in the room can move she is. Towards the man with the flame-thrower.

Someone calls her name behind her but she doesn’t care enough to listen. She walks right up to the man, who watches her with apathetic eyes, and swipes his last two beers out from under his chair.

His hand shoots out and wraps tightly around her arm before she can step away.

“Put 'em back, girly.”

“Mick!” Sara snaps.

“I need them. You've had enough.” Amanda says.

“Put them back or I'll make you put them back.”

“Mick, you really don't want-”

“Stay out of this, Haircut,” he growls, eyes never leaving Amanda, “I can take her.”

“No Mr. Rory you really can't.”

Amanda looks down into the man’s eyes. She doesn’t spear or growl or snap. She just says, softly.

“If you wanna start a fight, you better throw the first punch. Make it a good one.”

The warehouse goes heavily quiet around them as they stare each other down. Then Mick's eyes flicker, maybe with recognition of similarity or of superior fire power she doesn’t know, and he lets go of her arm.

She flicks the caps off with her thumbs and turns away, pushing through the crowd of weary looking people to stand in front of her brother.

“Here,” she holds the beer out under his nose, “drink.”

He doesn’t look up and he doesn’t take the drink. For a moment Amanda wonders if all the older sibling instincts in her got put back in the wrong order. Maybe she's gotten this all wrong, maybe she needs to pick her brother up and take him far away from here, or screen him off from everyone else, or just leave him alone until he wants her help. She nudges the bottle against his knuckles again and this time his fist uncurls and he takes it. Good. Ok.

She flicks her wrist and a crate scrapes across the floor to be her seat, Startling several people.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't finished this because i had a better idea for a similar fic so this is sort of a first draft. Dedicated to Fern who is nice and coo.


End file.
